Barcelona travel guide

Top 10 sights in Barcelona

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica and Expiatory Church of the Holy Family

   Begun in 1882 and still going, funded from the start only by donations and ticket money, which is why it has taken so long. Gaudí took charge in 1883, worked on it for forty-three years and is buried in the crypt; the central tower is due to top out in 2026, a century after he was hit by a tram.

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2. 

   2© Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Park Güell

   Gaudí's failed housing estate of 1900 to 1914 — only two of sixty plots ever sold, so the city bought it and made it a park. The trencadís lizard on the stairs and the wave bench above the hall of columns are what everyone comes for, and the monumental zone is now ticketed by time slot.

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3. 

   3© Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia

   A Gothic cathedral built between 1298 and 1420, though the pinnacled front was added in 1913 to a medieval drawing. Thirteen white geese live in the cloister, one for each year of the life of Eulàlia, the city's patron, who was killed by the Romans at thirteen.

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4. 

   4© Diliff · CC BY 2.5

   Torre Glòries

   Jean Nouvel's tower of 2005, a hundred and forty-four metres of coloured glass over concrete with four and a half thousand LED-lit windows. Nouvel said the form came from the rock spires of Montserrat; Barcelona has a different and less reverent comparison for it.

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5. 

   5

   Plaça de Catalunya

   The hinge of the city, where the medieval streets end and the nineteenth-century grid begins. The fighting of July 1936 that Orwell describes started around this square, and everything now converges on it — metro, airport bus and the top of the Rambla.

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6. 

   6© Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Casa Vicens

   Gaudí's first substantial building, put up between 1883 and 1885 for a tile manufacturer, and covered accordingly in green and white tiles patterned with marigolds. It stayed in private hands and opened to the public only in 2017, which is why fewer people know it.

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7. 

   7© Thomas Ledl · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Palau Güell

   A town palace built between 1886 and 1888 for Eusebi Güell on a narrow, dark plot, which Gaudí solved vertically — carriages drove in under parabolic arches to a basement stable, and the roof is a garden of twenty chimneys in broken tile.

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8. 

   8© MARIA ROSA FERRE ✿ from Vilafranca del penedes, Catalunya · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

   In the Palau Nacional built for the 1929 exposition, and holding the greatest collection of Romanesque wall painting anywhere. The frescoes were stripped from remote Pyrenean churches in the 1920s, by Italian technicians, specifically to stop dealers buying them for America.

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9. 

   9© Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Fundació Joan Miró

   A museum of 1975 designed for Miró by his friend Josep Lluís Sert, with roof lanterns that light the paintings by day alone. Miró gave it the work himself and it stays close to the way he wanted it hung, which few artist museums manage.

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10. 

    10© Kent Wang · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Basilica of Our Lady of the Sea

    Built between 1329 and 1383 by the porters of the harbour quarter, who carried the stone down from Montjuïc on their backs — the guild is carved on the doors. Fifty-four years from start to finish gives it a unity nothing else Gothic has; anarchists burned the interior in 1936 and the bare stone is the result.

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1. 

   1© Bajajvikram · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Arc de Triomf

   The entrance gate to the Universal Exposition of 1888, built in red brick with Mudéjar detailing rather than in the Roman manner the name suggests. The promenade beyond it runs down to the Ciutadella park, the rest of that fair's legacy.

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2. 

   2© C messier · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Montjuïc Castle

   A former military fortress on the summit of Montjuïc, whose origins go back to 1640. The city of Barcelona now administers it; its guns were turned on the city more than once, and Lluís Companys was shot in its moat in 1940.

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3. 

   3© SACE (Servicios Aéreos Comerciales Españoles); Rodríguez Escalona, Carlos · CC BY 1.0

   Parc de la Ciutadella

   Thirty-one hectares laid out in the 1870s on the ground of the hated Bourbon citadel, and for decades the city's only park. It holds the zoo, the Catalan parliament in the old arsenal, a boating lake and Josep Fontsere's cascade, on which the young Gaudi worked.

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4. 

   4© Gena Haltmair · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Columbus Monument

   A sixty-metre column to Columbus at the foot of the Ramblas, raised for the Barcelona Universal Exposition of 1888. It marks the fact that Barcelona was where Columbus reported to Isabella and Ferdinand on his return from the Americas.

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5. 

   5© Pere López · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museu Picasso

   Five medieval palaces knocked together, holding the work Picasso made before he was famous — the academic studies, the Blue Period, and the fifty-eight variations on Velázquez's Meninas he painted in 1957. His friend Sabartés proposed it and Picasso gave the pictures.

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6. 

   6© Jordiferrer · CC BY-SA 3.0

   National Expiatory Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

   A Catholic church and minor basilica on the summit of Tibidabo. The Catalan architect Enric Sagnier designed it and his son Josep Maria finished it, the work running from 1902 to 1961; a funicular climbs to it from the city.

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7. 

   7© Canaan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Church of Colònia Güell

   Gaudi's unfinished church for Eusebi Guell's factory village at Santa Coloma de Cervello. Commissioned in 1898, begun in 1908 and abandoned in 1914 when Guell died, it got no further than the lower nave, whose leaning basalt columns were finished by 1917.

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8. 

   8© Thingstodoinbarcelona · CC BY-SA 4.0

   La Boqueria

   A market that began as stallholders spilling off the Rambla in the thirteenth century and got its iron roof in 1914. It is now half tourist attraction and half working market; the fish and the mushroom stalls at the back are where the cooks still shop.

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9. 

   9© Paux127 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Royal Square

   A square in the Gothic Quarter close to the Ramblas. Restaurants and well-known clubs such as Sidecar and Jamboree open onto it, which is why it fills at night; Gaudí designed the lampposts.

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10. 

    10© jordi domènech · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Magic Fountain of Montjuïc

    A fountain built for the 1929 exposition by the engineer Carles Buïgas, who worked out how to make water and coloured light move together. The show still runs at the foot of the Montjuïc steps in the evenings, though drought years have shut it off.

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